The juncos came back this week. I noticed them on Sunday morning, working the ground beneath the platform feeder in their tidy, head-down way, gray hoods and white bellies and the small tail flashes that give them away when they fly. There were five of them, and by Wednesday there were nine.

Every year I forget, in the bright weeks of October, that the juncos are coming. They breed in the boreal forests north of here, on the edges of spruce stands where I have never seen them, and then in late autumn they move south by the millions and turn up in suburban yards and woodland edges and on the snowy verges of country roads. Cornell calls them one of the most common birds in North America, and yet to me they always feel like guests, because they are only here for the cold half of the year.

The Sound Comes Before the Bird

The first sign is almost never the bird itself. It is the sound. Their call is a thin, dry trill, very different from the chip notes of the sparrows I see all summer, and once it starts up around the feeder it does not really stop until April. There is a kind of mental switch that flips for me when I first hear it. The yard has a different cast for the winter now. The summer crew has gone and the winter crew is settling in.

What I have come to appreciate about juncos is how unfussy they are. The chickadees and titmice will come to almost anything you put up. The cardinals want big seed, and they want it where they can sit and look around first. The juncos are ground feeders, and they want whatever has fallen from above and landed where they can scratch through it. This makes them the easiest birds in the yard to feed, because the easiest thing to do is put a small tray on the ground or a flat platform a foot off it, and let the spill from the upper feeders do most of the work.

An Unfussy Bird

I keep a corner of the yard, just behind the lilac, that I do not rake in the fall. The leaves stay where they land and so do the seed heads on the perennials. By the time the snow comes there is a small drift of dry organic matter against the fence, and the juncos work it through the winter, turning leaves over with both feet at once in the funny double-kick that ground sparrows do. It is the simplest thing I have ever done for birds and it pays back every cold morning from November to April. Other small habits in the yard tend to work the same way.

If you have not had ground feeders in your yard before, the juncos are a good place to start. They are not shy, they tolerate a fair amount of activity nearby, and they will draw in other species behind them. Once the juncos are working a patch, the white-throated sparrows often follow, and on some mornings I get a tree sparrow or two, and once, two winters ago, a fox sparrow that stayed three days and never came back. The list of ground feeders is longer than people realize, and most of them will only show up if there is something on the ground worth coming down for.

Why Ground Feeding Matters

This week the juncos have settled in. They are working the same patch every morning, and by midday the cardinals come down and join them, and the squirrels have figured out the new traffic pattern and adjusted their routes. The yard has its winter shape now. I noticed yesterday that I have already started looking out the kitchen window at first light, which is something I do not do in summer. The birds make you do it.

If you are setting up for the cold months, do not overlook the ground. Most of the yard happens down there, and the juncos are the proof. I counted them again this morning before the coffee was finished and the count was, as I expected, a little larger than yesterday, which is how Novembers in this yard tend to go.